Helena Karasti & Gaia Mosconi (Siegen) on “Open science, data practices and infrastructure: two multidimensional empirical accounts“

The Open Science (OS) agenda aims to promote cultural, organizational and infrastructural changes across academia, potentially massive and pervasive in scope. In fact, OS intends to make scientific research and data “accessible to all” by removing barriers to sharing, regardless of the type of output, resources, data, methods or tools used and independently from the actual research process. To satisfy OS-driven policies (pushed by funding bodies and other stakeholders), Institutionally-based Repositories have proliferated, within which researchers are expected to publish their scientific data. Significant research has been devoted to studying the issues associated with managing Open Research Data. In particular, Digital Curation, as it is typically known, seeks to address the (cyclic) process of data management to ensure (1) its long-term value (digital preservation) and (2) encourage secondary use. While we believe that “openness” will ultimately help to increase the quality of research, improve research methods and enhance reflexivity in scientific work, in this talk, we want to address the drastic gap that still exists between the OS grand vision and actual researchers’ data practices, though also some functioning examples of data management and sharing exist. We suggest that interdisciplinary research contexts offer a perspicuous opportunity to understand better the Data Curation and Research Data Management issues that can problematise uptake and practices. These relate to obvious discrepancies between Open Research Data policies and subject-specific research practices and needs. We present two empirical accounts of interdisciplinary research contexts in order to discuss which steps need to be undertaken to pursue the OS agenda and realize its benefits. We also aim to encourage researchers to join this discussion and actively engage in shaping the future of science.

The lecture series on “Data Practices” explores data “in motion”, both theoretically, empirically and methodology. The proliferation of data-intensive media requires researchers to develop their conceptual vocabulary and socio-technical understanding of data production, calculation and their underlying practices and infrastructures. Throughout the lecture series, we ask how a praxeological account can enable us to account for the movement and transformation of data. We consider data practices as those practices involved in the making, calculation, storage, accounting and valuation of data among others which are socio-material and entangled with infrastructures. The lecture series is jointly organised by the DFG graduate school “Locating Media” and the DFG cooperative research centre “Media of Cooperation”.